“Then you’ll fix it without any help from me.”

Paul had stepped off the merry-go-round, and, absurdly, was walking along to keep pace with their table. It was all very symbolical, she thought – and much too difficult to work out now.

“I’ll fix it,” said Mrs Bannister. “Don’t you worry.”

“OK.” He turned on his heel. “Have it like that.”

“Goodbye,” she called after him. “Goodbye, for about a year.”

Chapter Six

It was a curious year, the year that now ensued; a year of retreat, a year of dedication. Paul Marchant, proud and angry, kept to his word and dropped out of her life altogether; and rid of this male complication, and the emotional tie that went with it, she was free to concentrate on the task she had set herself. Many things happened, in the outside world, that might have distracted her: there were the Russians, there was rearmament, there were atom spies, there was a Communist under every bed. But Mrs Bannister seemed able to turn her back on all such complications: for her, there was only one person, and one idea – Esther Costello, and the need to reach her mind and be reached by it.

Many times, when the fund of patience which this demanded was drawn wire-thin, she doubted the rightness of what she was doing. Her new decision – as with the original one, two years ago in Cloncraig – had been a compound of many factors and many feelings: she had wanted to rescue Esther, she had wanted to finish what she had started, she had wanted to retrieve the public defeat which the newspapers had summed up in the words ‘No Hope for Esther Costello’. She might even have needed to demonstrate to Paul that she was a free agent, a personality in her own right, and not dependent on him for inspiration of any sort … But whatever had driven her to volunteer for the job, there was no doubt that it was a slow, complicated, and enormously difficult affair which would only be solved by complete, single-minded concentration.

Nor would there ever be a dividend for her, in any event. That was obvious. Success would tie her to Esther for life; and failure would be a waste of time so absurd and so mortifying that she would never be able to trust herself with a fundamental decision again.

But still she laboured, and hoped, and watched. When the amazing results began to come, when Esther grew to humanity again, it seemed no more than was owed to all the immense care that had gone before. For years afterwards, when people talked of ‘miracles’, Mrs Bannister was always secretly annoyed. This thing had been worked for: nothing so lazy, so feeble, so inept as a miracle, had had any part in it.

The fantastic story started at the local Deaf-and-Dumb Institute; and there, the first thing they found out about Esther Costello was that she could spell. At Mrs Bannister’s suggestion, they began with the blessed word ‘fire’, which she had been able to ‘get through’ to Esther while they had been waiting at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, and which she had answered so movingly. Then they combined it with something else: whenever they said ‘fire’, they tapped four times in the palm of her hand, for the word’s four letters. This puzzled and defeated Esther for many weeks, until they began to fear that the whole conception of spelling, which had been hers five years before, had vanished in the blank intervening time. But there came a day when she suddenly smiled, and tapped four times back, and nodded, and tried to make four separate noises in her throat …